WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.

We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence

March 8, 2009:The Martyrdom of Vanunu: Machiavelli and PeresAn Exclusive Report for The PT/The Palestine Telegraph: We Will Change Our Worldhttp://www.paltelegraph.com/

The best understanding of a martyr is one who chooses to suffer, to die rather than renounce their principles. A martyr is also one who has given themselves up as a witness...

The essence of Christianity is to bear witness to what Jesus was always on about; forgiveness, love, reconciliation and the intrinsic equality of all people.

Within days of the announcement of a record 205 nominations for 2009’s Nobel Peace Prize, [one of several prizes endowed by Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel] perpetual nominee Mordechai Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:

I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations…I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres…Peres established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel…Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping…he continues to oppose my freedom and release…WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM….FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW.

Peres and Machiavelli

In 1963, when Vanunu was nine years old the Zionists came to his home town of Marrakech, Morocco and convinced his Orthodox father to abandon his general store and pack up the first seven of his eleven children for the land of milk and honey. Instead, the Vanunu's were banished to the desert of Beesheva.

A few months later, Shimon Peres, then Israel's Deputy Minister of Defense met with President John Kennedy, inside the White House.

Kennedy told Peres, "You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?"

Peres replied, "I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."

By September of 1986, Peres was convulsing over Vanunu, who had been employed as a lowly tech in his progeny; Israel’s clandestine underground nuclear weapons centre in the Negev called the Dimona.

Peres ordered the Mossad, to "Bring the son of a bitch back here."

Peres ordered Vanunu's kidnapping that included a clubbing, drugging and being flung upon an Israeli cargo boat back to Israel for a closed door trial.

In 1985, before quitting the Dimona, Vanunu shot 56 photos of the top-secret labs and production processes that proved Israel had become a major nuclear power by stockpiling between 100 and 200 atomic bombs within the six underground levels where plutonium production, and secret nuclear weapons were assembled without any knowledge, debate or authorization from its own citizens. Israel has yet to allow International Inspectors into the aged Dimona plant which is leaking and endangering the health of its own citizens.

In April 2005, two months before my first of six trips to Israel Palestine, I turned the TV on- it had last been tuned into the History channel. At that moment, they were broadcasting a show called, "Sexpionage" all about Russian female spies and one from the Mossad.

The very first clip that ran before my eyes was of Vanunu being transported to his closed door trial. It was the few famous seconds I had never witnessed, of Vanunu’s inspired move to write upon his palm: "HIJACKED" and the Rome flight number he had been on.That moment in history soon led investigative journalist Peter Hounam to the Mossad agent; Cindy/Cheryl.On the show, that clip was followed by one of Shimon Perez in 1986, resurrecting the spirit of Machiavelli as he mendaciously claimed that Israel would never be the first in the Mid East to possess nuclear weapons.

As we live Orwell’s nightmare, Peres was the one awarded for playing a part in achieving the Oslo Declaration of Principles.

According to the preamble of the DOP, this peace was supposed to be based on mutual respect and reconciliation.

Ever since receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in achieving the Oslo agreement, Peres has been most instrumental in helping to destroy the agreement.

Alfred Nobel’s intention was to reward people with a moral backbone. Nobel had hoped to create icons and examples to humankind.

Annually since 1986, Vanunu has been nominated for The Nobel Peace Prize. When Bishop Tutu nominated him in 2007, Vanunu told me that he didn't want the award if Israel refused him the liberty and freedom to go and accept it.

In April 1999, thirty-six members of the House of Representatives signed a letter calling for Vanunu's release from prison because they believed "we have a duty to stand up for men and women like Mordechai Vanunu who dare to articulate a brighter vision for humanity."

President Clinton responded with a public statement expressing concern for Vanunu and the need for Israel and other non-parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to adhere to it and accept IAEA safeguards, and ever since the silence has been deafening; but the times are always a changing.

Vanunu’s inspired refusal of his 23rd nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize scored a direct hit at the hypocrisy of the claim that Israel is a democracy. It also delivered a left to the liver to the Peres.

Niccolo Machiavelli, offered the Renaissance monarchy advice designed to keep power with policies to discourage mass political activism. Machiavelli held that political life cannot be governed by a single set of moral ethics or religious absolutes. Machiavelli offered the monarch excuses and rationales to enable them to sleep at night after ordering calculated acts of deception, lies, cover-ups, and ethically indefensible acts of violence upon innocent lives. To call a politician “Machiavellian” is to say that politician excels in the politics of manipulation and deception and is driven by lust for power.

But Machiavelli was also misunderstood and ignored in other regards, such as his concern with “republics” [states] controlled by a politically active citizenry. In his “Discourses” he emphasized that for a republic to survive, it needed to foster a spirit of patriotism and civic virtue among its citizens. Machiavelli argued that a republic would be strengthened by the conflicts generated through open political participation and debate.

This lesson Peres has yet to learn, but not due to the efforts of Vanunu. When Vanunu acted in 1985, he wanted to open up the dialogue on nuclear weapons as well as opening the Dimona up to international inspections.

Vanunu’s inspired move in 1986, to plaster his printed palm to the van of the window, he provoked Israel to silence him by blacking out the windows of the van and putting a helmet on his head.

Vanunu’s inspired move in 2009, to decline the Nobel was picked up by the The Wall Street Journal : Vanunu Writes to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee: "I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Shimon Peres" [1]

The WSJ is the first major USA corporate controlled media to allow a tear in the iron curtain media shield regarding Vanunu’s freedom of speech trial and conviction.

In the land of the free where freedom of speech is our greatest liberty, the USA corporate media has been missing in action all during a FREEDOM OF SPEECH Trial in the democracy of Israel.

"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control." [2]

On Jan. 25, 2006, Vanunu's FREEDOM OF SPEECH TRIAL began the same day as the Palestinian’s democratically elected Hamas to represent them as Fatah had become just another layer of The Occupation of Palestine.On July 2, 2007, an Israeli court sentenced Mordechai Vanunu, to six more months in jail for violating the unenforceable ban imposed in 2004. Since his release from Ashkelon Prison on April 21, 2004, Israel has denied Vanunu the right to leave the state and has forbidden him the right to speak to foreigners. Two days before President Bush's first trip to Israel Palestine and a day before Vanunu's appeal was to begin, Israel sentenced him to community service instead.On Feb. 5, 2008, Vanunu met with prison officials to arrange community service and learned that to his "surprise they say there is no community service in East Jerusalem. I told them the agreement for community service was on this condition that it will be only in the East Jerusalem. They say no one told them about this… I will do community service in the East Jerusalem or the appeal begins and may be the prison sentence."

Since his release from 18 years in Ashkelon Prison on April 21, 2004, Vanunu has only lived in East Jerusalem:"I went three times to West Jerusalem by taxi because I had to go to the Supreme Court. All three times some right wing extremist Jews shouted and threatened me. My community is the Lutheran Church in the Old City, the Palestinians on the streets and internationals. I have met with hundreds, thousands- probably even five thousand people since 2004."

Everyone who talks with Vanunu on the street, on the phone, email, snail mail or anywhere at all in occupied east Jerusalem, understands that they are potentially being monitored by cogs in the industrial security-surveillance complex. Israel had hoped that the world would forget about Vanunu.

The martyrdom of Vanunu is also about the Christian persecution inflicted by the Jewish State. When he emerged from his windowless tomb sized cell on April 21, 2004, Vanunu said:

“I am not harming Israel. I am not interested in Israel. I want to tell you something very important. I suffered here 18 years because I am a Christian, because I was baptised into Christianity. If I was a Jew I wouldn't have all this suffering here in isolation for 18 years. Only because I was a Christian man.”

From interviews with Vanunu 2005-2008:

“My human rights have been denied me because I am a Christian. When I was on trial, I was treated just like a Palestinian: no human rights at all, and cruel and unusual punishment, all because I told the truth. The government spread slander about me, that I was a homosexual, that I hated Jews, that I wanted fame and money. What I did was sacrifice my life for the truth. In prison, I really began to feel like Jesus and Paul. When Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, it was like me in Dimona, exposing the Israelis' dirty secrets. I felt like Paul, being thrown in prison for speaking the truth.

"The only real way to worship is in loving one's enemies. It was not easy to love my tormentors; it was only because I felt so much like Jesus crucified on the cross, and as if I was crucified in prison, that I could do it. It was not ever easy. I have forgiven but not forgotten anything, and I never will.

“In Israel, a life sentence is twenty-five years. Even murderers go free after seventeen. They imposed the same restrictions on me that Palestinians receive: no human rights at all; no phone; no visitors, except family, and only through an iron grill; no vacation; no holidays; and no gifts. Even murderers get out for vacations! I was locked up for eighteen years and still cannot go on vacation; I cannot leave, and that is all I am asking for, just to leave here.

“For eighteen years in prison, they even attempted to control my thoughts on paper. I would write exactly what I wanted and they would censor words like kidnapped and atomic bomb. They would show me how they chopped up my letters, but I continued to write exactly what I wanted. They held my body, but never my spirit or mind.

“I really had no clue what I was doing by getting baptized a Christian; I just felt like I had to do it. It was my way to become a new being. It wasn’t until after my trial that I started to read the New Testament. While I was in prison, I would read aloud for a half hour, twice a day. I would read the entire New Testament and begin it again when I finished the Book of Revelation. I did this for myself, as well as for my captors--not so much the prison guards, but the ones who watched me on camera twenty-four hours a day.

“Once I covered up the camera that spied on me and was punished with one month in solitary, without any books or radio; no contact with anyone anywhere was allowed. It was just them, watching me, constantly watching me. The Shen Beet, you know, like the FBI and the Mossad, like your CIA— they were watching me. They tortured me by keeping a light on in my cell constantly for two years. They told me it was because they were afraid I would commit suicide, and the oppressive camera was for my safety. They recruited the guards and other prisoners to irritate me. They would deprive me of sleep by making loud noises near my cell all night long.

“I chose to read them 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8, instead:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with THE TRUTH! It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails.

"This administration tells me I am not allowed to speak to foreigners, the Media, and the world. But I do because that is how I prove my true humanity to the world.

"The Israelis have 200 atomic weapons and they accuse the Palestinians and Muslims of terrorism. The Dimona is 46 years old; reactors last 25 to 30 years. The Dimona has never been inspected and Israel has never signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but all the Arab states have.

“Twenty years ago when I worked there they only produced when the air was blowing towards Jordan ten miles away. No one knows what is happening now. The world needs to wake up and see the real terrorism is the occupation and the Palestinians have lived under that terror regime for 40 years.

"All the secrets I had were published in 1989 in an important book, by Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East…For 18 years in prison I felt like a man at a train station, waiting for my train. I lived in a six by nine foot space without a window for 18 years. Every day I would get up, get dressed, put on my shoes, look at the same four walls and wait for that train that never came…Now I live in a nine by nine space with four walls, I have a window to the Mount of Olives and the street. But, I live like a tourist without even a TV in a cheap hotel and all I want to do is leave Jerusalem. I am no longer waiting for a train. Now I am at the airport terminal waiting for my plane…

"It's very sad that Hilary Clinton went to the Jewish Wailing Wall and forgot the real crying wall is the Palestinian wall; the apartheid wall, the wall is not for defense, but to keep this conflict permanent.

"The only way to peace is peace; the only way is nonviolence. The only answer to Israeli nuclear weapons, their aggression, occupation and oppression, and the wall and refugee camps is to answer them with truth and a peaceful voice. When I became the spy for the world, I did it all for the people of the world. If governments do not report the truth, and if the media does not report the truth, then all we can do is follow our consciences. Daniel Ellsberg did, the woman from Enron did, and I did.

“The United States needs to wake up and see the truth that Israel is not a democracy, unless you are a Jew. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where America can right now find nuclear weapons.

"America can also find where basic human rights have been denied Christians: right here in Israel. The time has come for the United States to see the truth of Zionism. It began as a secular nationalist movement, not a religious one. Then some Christians believed that when Israel became a nation, it was the beginning of the second coming. They are deluded if they believe peace will come through atomic weapons. Atomic weapons are holocaust weapons. Christians should be the first people against them.

“Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew."

In 1986, Vanunu was a mid-tech worker in Israel's underground WMD facility in the Negev, but the sign out front back them still proclaimed it was a Textile Plant. All employees signed a secrecy agreement to never speak about what they did in the Dimona, and all jobs were compartmentalized.

Because Vanunu was a good worker, he was cross trained in many areas and woke up to the fact that he was but a cog in the making of weapons of mass destruction. Without talking to family or friends, he decided totally on his own document the facts underground in the Dimona nuclear weapons plant by photographing the evidence.

Vanunu easily obtained the keys to the restricted areas after they had been carelessly left in the shower room by a supervisor. Vanunu shot two rolls of film in the underground WMD facility but did not develop them until ten months later while in Sydney, Australia and just days after being baptized a Christian.

The photos were published in the London Sunday Times just as Vanunu was being kidnapped, clubbed, drugged and bound by the Mossad in Rome and then flung onto an Israeli ship heading home.

Instead of Israel being grateful for the alert to their inadequate security in the nuclear reactor facility, Israel tried Vanunu for treason in a closed door trial and locked him up for 18 years, most all of it in solitary. Vanunu has not set foot into the Dimona since 1986 and International Inspectors never have.

On April 21, 2004, Vanunu was released from Ashkelon Prison, but still not free. He has lived under the draconian 1945 British Mandate State of Emergency Regulations, which forbids him from leaving Israel and speaking to media and foreigners. After WW II, Attorney Yaccov Shapiro, who later became Israel's Minister Of Justice, described the Emergency Defense Regulations which denies Vanunu the inalienable rights of freedom of speech and movement as "unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany."[ N.S. Ateek, Justice and Only Justice p.34]

On February 12, 2008, the US Senate approved a sweeping measure that would expand the government's clandestine surveillance powers. The Senate approved the re-authorization of a law that would give the government greater powers to eavesdrop in intelligence cases without obtaining warrants from a secret court. The most important change approved by the Senate would make permanent a law approved in August 2007 that expanded the government's authority to intercept -- without a court order -- the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States communicating with others overseas.

That news and Vanunu's historic freedom of speech trial have both been ignored by corporate controlled media, as has the Vanunu-Microsoft connection:

On February 22, 2006 it was revealed in court that Israel had asked Microsoft to hand over all the details of Vanunu's Hotmail account before a court order had been obtained.

Vanunu: "Microsoft obeyed the orders and gave them all the details…three months before I was arrested and my computers were confiscated…it is strange to ask Microsoft to give this information before obtaining the court order to listen to my private conversations. It means they wanted to go through my emails in secret, or maybe, with the help of the secret services, the Shaback, Mossad…Sfard [Vanunu's attorney] proved that the police had misled the judges who gave the orders to arrest me: to search my room, to go through my email, to confiscate my computers and that they misled Microsoft to believe they are helping in a case of espionage. The State came to the court with two special secret Government orders; Hisaion [documents or information that are deemed confidential by the government and kept from the court, the defendant, and lawyers.] This allows the prosecution to keep documents related to my court hearing secret. One was from the Minister for Interior Security and one from the Minister of Defense."

Vanunu's secretly taped police interrogations, his 2004 Christmas Eve arrest for "attempting to leave the country" when he attempted to celebrate mass at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the confiscation of his private property by thirty IDF that stormed into his room at St. George's Cathedral in 2004, according to Vanunu have all "been done…under the false and misleading statements to the courts of 'suspicion of espionage', and yet they are not charging me with spy crimes… and the fact is that I have not committed any crimes."

Vanunu: The Elephant in the World

Vanunu reminds the world that Israel is a nuclear power and that its warheads stand ready to be fired from the Negev desert. Vanunu also reminds the world that despite America’s war on Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the USA Government continues to give their political, moral and economic support to a country that has amassed undisputed and still uninspected weapons of mass destruction in the leaking dinosaur that is the Dimona Nuclear Facility.

"The media should be a sanctuary for dissent. It is our job to go to where the silence is."-Amy Goodman

If the media had been a sanctuary of dissent Israel's WMD facility would no longer be unexplored territory by IAEA inspectors, nor would have Helen Thomas' Middle East nuclear question to President Obama been ignored!

Senator Barack Obama stated "As president, I will set a new direction in nuclear weapons policy and show the world that America believes in its existing commitment under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to work to ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons. I fully support reaffirming this goal, as called for by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, as well as the specific steps they propose to move us in that direction." [3]

Obama made that promise to ACT/Arms Control Today, a leading journal devoted to nonproliferation and global security issues. ACT questioned Obama [and other presidential candidates] regarding arms control and nonproliferation; from Russia to Iran and about U.S. policy on cluster munitions and regarding a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, created in 1968, maintains that nuclear weapons proliferation can only be curtailed if nuclear countries make moves toward disarmament and the rest of the world is allowed to access civilian nuclear technology.

If the media in America were a sanctuary for dissent every candidate for Congress and Presidential office, would be grilled on America's record regarding the NPT; and held to the fire for their silence about Israel's still un-inspected underground WMD facility and refusal to sign onto the NPT.

If we the people in the USA are suppose to be the government we must be informed and vigilant for American taxpayers provide Israel with $7-10 million per day that is consumed by the Occupation of Palestine.

2008 was the 60th anniversaries of the statehood of Israel, Nakba and the UN UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. -Article 19.Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Article 13: 2

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is binding on "all countries of the world". The statehood of Israel was contingent upon upholding it. EQUAL human rights are declared as UNDERSTOOD at the outset of the document as "inalienable" and therefore can not be denied by any government.

States and Nations have Obligations. People have RIGHTS.

From Ashkelon prison in 1987, Mordechai Vanunu wrote:

The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today…

This struggle is not only a legitimate one - it is a moral, inescapable struggle. What we who are opposed to nuclear arms are saying is this: it is not we who broke the law, who violated human and civil rights, but the governments which chose to create the greatest threat to human life that ever existed. Never in human history was there such a threat to the very existence of mankind and to all life on earth…

And no government, not even the most democratic, can force us to live under this threat. No state in the world can offer any kind of security against this menace of a nuclear holocaust, or guarantee to prevent it…

By returning to the pre-nuclear era…We are the sane civilians, we want to live - and we say to the governments, "no nuclear arms!"

We must arouse people and warn them. Ours is the role of the angry prophet…A person who refuses to accept the existence of this suicidal type of arms is a mentally healthy person, who does not want to be expelled from this earth as Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over.

Nuclear weapons are means of extermination, and cannot protect any country, including Israel.

A state that lives in fear of destruction must not threaten the whole world with annihilation. The people who experienced a holocaust must not bring a holocaust upon another people.

Moreover, a nuclear war is worse than the holocaust of World War II. A single bomb can eliminate a whole city, destroy half a million people in one blow, including women, children and old people, and everything that lives in it, and even the very infra-structure of the city.

The effects could last for hundreds of years - and yet it is so easy to do. That is the real holocaust. That is the real enemy, and not as the Israelis imagine.

This issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy…Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger.

Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened. Therefore, when a man is held hostage by his own government, the least he can do is resist it and its nuclear policy. He must do this in self-defense, which is a basic civil right.

Indeed, when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens - and this is true in most cases - they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation…

Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?

The United States developed its atom bomb during World War II, without giving much thought to the long-term effects and consequences - and the rest of the world has followed it to this day…

Only peace between states can promise real security to each state and to every citizen. No force in the world can provide security or ensure survival…

It was not force which spread the word of Jesus through the world…Children are brought into this world to live in it, not to fight. It is not true that war is an inevitable state of affairs - on the contrary, what is essential is peace.

It is a question of listening to your conscience, to the voice of Jesus telling you, yes, this is what you must do--sacrifice yourself, your personal freedom: in the nuclear era, and with the nuclear threat hanging over us, the answer to this challenge is obvious, one may not evade such a responsibility, one must accept the mission in order to warn against the danger.

At that point in Vanunu's 1987 statement words were crossed out by the Israeli censors.

Vanunu was writing the speech in response to being awarded The Right Livelihood Award, better known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

Instead, Vanunu sat in silence in a windowless tomb sized jail cell while his brother Meir read the above statement at the ceremony for the Right Livelihood Award. The award was established in 1980 to honor personal courage that inspires social transformation and supports those "offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today."

One of last year's recipients was journalist Amy Goodman, whose infamous interview with Vanunu in 2004 was used as major testimony against him in his ongoing freedom of speech trial that began in January 2006.

Not until after the July 2007 sentence of six more months in jail, did Amy Goodman phone Vanunu for a follow up interview, but he wouldn't talk to her. When I saw Vanunu in Jerusalem a few weeks later, he told me he refused to speak to Amy because "the media has never helped me."

Amy Goodman was awarded the Alternative Nobel for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media."

In reply, Goodman affirmed, "I strongly believe that media can be a force for peace. It is the responsibility of journalists to give voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken and beaten down by the powerful. It is the best reason I know to carry our pens, cameras and microphones out into the world. The media should be a sanctuary for dissent. It is our job to go to where the silence is." [4]

The silence of the media regarding Vanunu’s trial and conviction for speaking to them and the silence regarding the undemocratic restrictions that forbid him the RIGHT to speak to foreigners and the RIGHT to leave the state should end by April 21, 2009. That is when the 5th year of restrictions that deny Vanunu his inalienable human right of speech and movement expire. Silence in response to wrong is complicity with it.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. -Article 19 UN Universal Declaration Human Rights

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.-13:2

The bottom line for Vanunu-and Gaza Palestine remains: FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM…NOW!

"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas

Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

" In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa

“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946

The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright

“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK

Establishment of Israel

"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel